At the three-way intersection between No. 2 Middle School, No. 7 Middle School, and Internet Café Street, there was a fairly large vegetable market.
Chen Guiliang bought four jin of pork, two jin of beef, and a bag of pork liver.
If he did not buy it in the county town, he would not be able to buy any all the way home. Meat was only sold in the rural towns on market days. You could usually buy some in the morning, but there definitely would not be any left in the afternoon.
He then returned to the dormitory to collect his luggage.
He stuffed the meat he had just bought into a bucket, placing the bag with the kitten on top of it. He packed his clothes, pants, and shoes into a woven plastic sack, slung on his backpack, and headed to the school gate to catch a ride.
After the beat-up bus jolted along for two or three hours, Chen Guiliang got off at the junction of the county road and the village road.
He carried the bucket in his left hand and the woven sack in his right, with more things stuffed in his backpack. The whole load was quite heavy.
He had not walked far before his whole body ached with exhaustion, while the kitten kept meowing without pause.
He recalled a morning in middle school. It had been this same lousy village road, with a light rain falling and the ground thick with mud. Walking through the slush had been difficult, and he had to keep himself from slipping and falling. It was still dark, making it hard to see, while he carried a backpack and thirty or forty jin of rice.
The rice had to be taken to school and exchanged for meal tickets.